The Devil in Gray

by Graham Masterton

  “You never told me why you do that,” Maggie said.

  “Hmm? Oh … superstition, that’s all.”

  With an operatic chorus of tires, Decker pulled up outside 4140 Davis Street and climbed out of his shiny black Mercury Grand Marquis. This was an elegant, expensive district, with redbrick sidewalks and shady trees and nineteenth-century houses with white-pillared porches. Usually, at this time of day, it was soporific and almost completely deserted, with no sign of life except for sleeping cats and American flags stirring idly in the breeze, but this afternoon there were four squad cars parked diagonally across the street with their lights flashing, an ambulance, a van from the Richmond Coroner’s Department, two TV crews, a crowd of uniforms and forensic investigators and reporters and all of those people who turn up at homicide scenes shouting on cell phones and looking harassed, even though Decker could never work out what most of them actually did. He even recognized Honey Blackwell from the mayor’s office, all 235 pounds of her, in a daffodil-yellow suit and a daffodil-yellow bow in her hair.

  “Afternoon, Ms. Blackwell.”

  “Afternoon, Lieutenant. Tragic business.”

  “Must be, if it took you away from Ma-Musu’s.” He was referring to her favorite restaurant, Ma-Musu’s West African restaurant on Broad Street.

  “You have a sharp tongue on you, Lieutenant. One of these days you’re going to cut your own throat with it.”

  “Not a very tasteful remark to make, Ms. Blackwell, under the circumstances.”

  Captain Cab Jackson came down the front steps of 4140, closely followed by Sergeant Tim Hicks. “Come by way of the heritage trail, did you, Decker?” Cab demanded, checking his watch. Cab was huge, over six feet five inches, with a dented bald head like one of the bollards where the stern-wheelers tied up by the James River. All the same, his face was chubby and his voice was unexpectedly high, so he had grown himself a Little Richard—style moustache in the hope of investing himself with some extra maturity. He wore a red-and-yellow-striped shirt with rows of pens and pencils clipped in the pocket, and his buttocks stuck out so far at the back that Detective Rudisill had famously described them as “Mount Buttmore.”

  Hicks himself was short, handsome, young, and bouncily fit, like a human basketball. He had been transferred to Richmond’s Central Zone only three months ago, from Fredericksburg, upstate, and he was still pepped up about working in the city. “We the elite,” he kept repeating, as they drove around town, slapping his hand rhythmically on the car door. Decker didn’t have the heart to tell him that his transfer had probably had far less to do with the excellence of his service record than it did with the interim chief’s urgent need to fill her quota of detectives of color.

  “So what’s the story?” Decker asked. “Pretty upscale neighborhood for a stabbing.”

  “You’d best come inside and see for yourself.”

  Decker followed Cab’s buttocks up the front steps and in through the glossy, black-painted front door. He noticed that the frame was splintered, where the paramedics had kicked it open. Hicks bubbled, “I never saw anything like it. I mean, the blood, Lieutenant. It’s like all over.”

  “Well, remember that you can decorate an entire living room with the blood from a single person’s circulatory system. Two coats, if you use a roller.”

  Alison’s pregnant body was still lying in the hallway, one shoe on, one shoe off. She was staring at the skirting board, her blue eyes wide open. She looked more baffled than horrified, even though her head was three inches away from her neck. Hicks was right about the blood. It was all over the polished oak floor, in splashes and smears and handprints. It was up the walls, all over the doors, spattered all over the cream linen blind. There was even a fan-shaped spray of blood on the ceiling.

  Decker knew from experience that blood had a way of getting everywhere. You could shoot somebody in an upstairs bedroom and tiny specks of blood would be found on the walls in the hall.

  A sallow, acne-pitted police photographer called Dave Martinez was taking pictures, and the intermittent flash gave the optical illusion that Alison was still twitching. Decker hunkered down beside her and looked into her wide blue Doris Day eyes. She looked back at him, her expression pleading, What’s happened to me?

  Decker glanced at her blood-drenched smock. “How far gone?” he asked Cab.

  “She was due on the twenty-first, according to her mother. But she was stabbed at least six times in the stomach. Baby didn’t stand a frigging chance.”

  “Uncanny, don’t you think?” Hicks said, breathing down Decker’s neck. “She looks as if she’s just about to say something.”

  “Oh yeah? You’d crap your pants if she did.” Decker abruptly stood up again, so that Hicks had to step back out of his way. He collided with one of the kitchen chairs and almost lost his balance.

  Cab sniffed and said, “Victim’s name is Alison Maitland, aged twenty-eight, wife of Gerald Maitland, aged thirty-three, who’s a junior partner with Shockoe Realty, 1818 East Cary Street.”

  “Where’s Maitland now?”

  “Still out in the ambulance. Arrested. Mirandized. They’re giving him first aid for some serious lacerations to his arms and face. Don’t worry … Wekelo and Saxman are with him.”

  “Talked to him yet?”

  Cab shook his head. “I tried, but he’s pretty shaken up. He said, ‘It just kept cutting us.’ I asked him what he was talking about, what kept cutting them, but he didn’t give any response. Well, nothing that made any damn sense.”

  “I also heard him say, ‘There was nobody there,’” Hicks put in. “He said it five or six times, ‘There was nobody there, there was nobody there.’ He was kind of muttering and mumbling, so you couldn’t hardly hear him.”

  Hicks paused, and then he added, “Funny thing was, it wasn’t like he was trying to convince me that there was nobody there. It was like he was trying to convince himself.”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into that,” Cab said. “Guy totally flipped, for whatever reason. Stress, business problems, domestic dispute, who knows? Every marriage is a mystery. Mine is, anyhow.”

  “Who called the cops?” Decker asked.

  Hicks snapped the elastic band off his notebook. “Alison Maitland put in a 911 call at 13:56 screaming for an ambulance. She said something about blood and she called out her husband’s name, but there was some kind of fault on the line and the rest of it was unintelligible. The paramedics arrived here at 14:14 but nobody answered the door and it took them a couple more minutes to gain access. When they broke in they found the victim lying right here in the hallway and her husband kneeling next to her, apparently attempting to replace her head.”

  “Looks like we’re dealing with an optimist, then,” Decker said.

  “Gerald Maitland himself was very badly cut, especially his arms and face. In fact his injuries could have been life-threatening.”

  “Self-inflicted?”

  “Must have been. When the paramedics broke down the door, the security chain was still fastened on the inside. Officers Wekelo and Saxman arrived a few minutes later at 14:28, and they found that all the back doors were securely locked and the only windows that were open were too small for anybody to have climbed in.”

  “Okay,” Decker said, looking around. “What about the weapon?”

  Cab said, “We haven’t actually located it yet.”

  “We haven’t located it? He would have needed a goddamned sword to cut her head off like this.”

  “Absolutely,” Cab agreed. “Not only that, at least three of the abdominal injuries penetrated right through the victim’s body from front to back, which indicates that the weapon was at least two feet long. But—whatever it was—we didn’t find it in the immediate locality of the body.”

  “You’ve been through the whole property?”

  Hicks said, “I organized a quick room-to-room. But Gerald Maitland was absolutely smothered in blood, head to foot—his wife’s blood and his own—and
he couldn’t have disposed of the weapon anyplace else in the house without leaving any footprints or handprints.

  “There are some traces of blood on the wall staircase, but Maitland was hanging wallpaper immediately prior to the killing and it looks as if he might have cut himself with his craft knife. We found the knife on the floor in the nursery, but it only has a two-inch blade, and although it does have a few drops of blood on it it obviously wasn’t the murder weapon.”

  “Kitchen knives?”

  “All of them clean except a small cook’s knife used for cutting a chicken sandwich.”

  Decker said, “Hicks—we need to do another search and we need to do it now. I want this whole house taken apart. Look outside in the yard. Take up the floorboards. Look in the toilet cisterns and the water tanks. For Christ’s sake, a weapon that size—it has to be somewhere.”

  Hicks raised his eyebrows at Cab in a mute appeal, but Cab nodded his assent. “Let’s just find this sucker, shall we?”

  While Hicks called in five uniformed officers for another search, Decker and Cab stepped outside the front door, onto the porch. It was stiflingly hot out there, but at least it didn’t reek of blood. One or two reporters shouted at Cab for a statement, but he waved his hand and shouted back, “Five minutes! Okay? Give me five minutes!”

  He dragged out a large white handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. “Goddamned allergy. It’s the myrtle. I’m a martyr to myrtle.”

  Decker said, “Maitland was frisked, I hope? I mean he couldn’t have smuggled the weapon out of the house down the leg of his pants or anything?”

  “Not a chance. Wekelo subjected him to a full body search before the paramedics carried him out of the house.”

  Decker brushed back his breeze-blown pompadour. “I don’t know … I’m beginning to smell something wrong with this already.”

  “So we haven’t located the murder weapon. We probably will, but even if we don’t we can still get a conviction. Who else could have done it?”

  “You’re probably right. But it kind of reminds me of the Behrens case. Like, Jim Behrens obviously garroted his entire family, but there was no apparent motive, and we never found the garrote, and Behrens claimed that some invisible force had come into his house and done it. The whole thing was so goddamned far out that the jury wouldn’t convict.” He put on his black-lense Police sunglasses. “Juries watch too much X-Files.”

  Cab sneezed and blew his nose again.

  “I bet you’ll shake that off, once you’re out on the lake,” Decker reassured him.

  Cab frowned at him. “What are you talking about, lake?”

  “You’re going fishing this weekend, aren’t you?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Er—you told me.”

  “When did I tell you?”

  “I don’t know … couple of days ago.”

  “I only decided last night.”

  “Well, you must’ve mentioned that you were thinking about it, that’s all.”

  Cab narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “I’m going fishing with Bill and Alfredick, if you must know, out to the Falling Creek reservoir.”

  “That’s great, Cab. You deserve a break.”

  “You think so?” Then—even more suspiciously, “Since when did you give a fuck?”

  Decker was tempted to say, “Every time you’re on duty,” but all he did was shrug and say, “I care about my fellow officers, Cab.”

  Cab still looked unimpressed, and blew his nose again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Decker went back to headquarters. The first thing he wanted to do was listen to Alison Maitland’s 911 call. Down in the basement, Jimmy Freedman, their sound technician, played it back for him, his chair tilted back, chewing gum and sniffing and tappety-tapping his pencil against the recording console.

  “There’s definitely a fault on the line, Sergeant, but it’s not like any regular fault. The regular faults are usually opens, which give you white noise, or shorts, which gives you, like, static, or else you get intermittents, which are usually caused by earth shifting or water ingress. But you listen to this.”

  He switched on the tape, and Decker heard the 911 operator responding to Alison’s call. “Emergency, which service?” This was followed by a crackling sound, and a very faraway voice, screaming. “Yes, ambulance”—more screaming, more crackling—“urgent—bleeding so bad!”

  “What the hell?” Decker said. “Sounds like she’s got the TV on.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jimmy said. “It’s not background noise. It’s actually breaking into her call from another location.”

  “Crossed line, then?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “It could be some kind of resistive fault, like an earth or a contact. But it’s very strange, the way it just switches off and on. Listen.”

  “It’s my husband—blood everywhere!”

  Decker blew out his cheeks. “That’s when he must have been stabbing her. Jesus.”

  But then there was shouting. It sounded like a crowd, panicking, but it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

  “For God’s sake—Alison—4140 Davis Street—my husband!”

  “Ma’am, can you repeat that address please? I can hardly hear you.”

  Screaming, and then a crunching noise.

  “Forty-one forty Davis Street! You have to help me—so much blood—you hear me?”

  Decker listened to the tape to the end. Then he said, “Any ideas? That sounds like a goddamned battle.”

  “Who knows? Somebody else could have had their phone off the hook, and, like you say, there could have been a war movie playing on television. But it would have had to be a recording, because I checked the TV listings and there were no war movies playing on any channel when this call was being made.

  “Like I say, though, it wasn’t like a normal fault. I’ll have to talk to Bill Duggan at the telephone company, see what he has to say about it. Meanwhile I’ll do what I can to clean it up. Maybe we can hear what those guys are yowling about.”

  At 9:00 P.M. that evening, Decker received a call from the Medical College Hospital that Gerald Maitland had recovered sufficiently to be questioned. Decker called Hicks to see if he could join him, but Hicks was still taking 4140 Davis Street to pieces in his efforts to find the murder weapon.

  He sounded exhausted.

  “I was wondering whether we ought to cut open the couch. I mean it’s real genuine leather, and it must have been pretty damned expensive.”

  “This is a homicide investigation, Hicks, not a furniture sale. Did you check up the chimneys?”

  “I called in Vacu-Stack. They vacuum-cleaned all five of them, but all they found was dead birds.”

  “Tried the bedding? I found a shotgun sewn up in a mattress once.”

  “We tore up the mattresses, the comforters, the pillows. We pulled down the drapes—you know, in case the murder weapon was hidden in the hem. We even tore their clothes to pieces.”

  “Looked in the kitchen? Cereal boxes, packets of spaghetti, rolls of foil?”

  “You name it, Lieutenant, we’ve looked in it.”

  “Okay … keep at it. I’ll call you when I’m done at the hospital.”

  He was walking out through the shiny new lobby when a girl’s voice called out, “Decker!”

  He skidded to a reluctant stop and turned around. It was Officer Mayzie Shifflett, from traffic. She had a dimpled, kittenish face that made her look five years younger than she really was, with a little tipped-up nose and freckles and big brown eyes. Her khaki shirt was stretched tight over her small, rounded breasts, and her skirt was stretched tight over her firm, rounded bottom. Her blond hair was fastened in a tight French pleat.

  “Are you avoiding me, Decker?”

  “Of course not. Caseload, that’s all.”

  “You weren’t working Tuesday night, were you?”

  “Tuesday? Ah—when was Tuesday?”

  “Tuesday was the day before yesterday, and Tue
sday was the day when you were supposed to be taking me to Awful Arthur’s.”

  He kicked the heel of his hand against the side of his head. “Jesus—you’re right, I was. Oh, Mayzie, I’m so sorry. Tuesday, my God. Do you know what happened?”

  “Of course I know what happened. I put on my killer blouse and I pinned up my hair and I sprayed myself with Giorgio and then I waited for two and a half hours watching Star Trek until I finally decided that you weren’t going to show.”

  “My mom had a fall. Her hip, you know? I had to go see her. I’m truly sorry. I was so worried about her that I totally forgot we had a date.”

  “Your mom had a fall. Decker—can’t you even lie to me without bring your mother into it?”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Mayzie. Do you think I would pass up on a date with you unless something really, really serious came up? Listen—I promise that I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Like when?”

  “I’m not sure. You’ve heard about this homicide on Davis Street—young woman had her head cut off. It’s a shocker—I’m right in the middle of that.”

  “Decker, I have to talk to you.”

  He clasped her shoulders and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Let’s make it next Tuesday, then. Same place, same time.”

  “Decker, I have to talk to you sooner than that. I missed my period.”

  He snorted. “Can’t you even lie to me without bringing my children into it?”

  “I’m serious, Decker. I think I’m pregnant.”

  “Ah. Pregnant.” He paused, and then he narrowed his eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  She stared at him without blinking for a long, long time and gradually it dawned on him that maybe she wasn’t kidding. He leaned closer and hissed, “How can you be pregnant? You’re on the pill, aren’t you?”

  “I had to stop taking it because of my antibiotics. It was only for two weeks. I didn’t think that—”

  “You didn’t think that if you made love without being on the pill that there might be some remote risk of motherhood? Or, even worse, fatherhood? I’m a detective, Mayzie, I’m not a daddy.”